Most recently, she headed up an all-star tribute to His Royal Badness at Sunday’s BET Awards, fronting The Roots for a rendition of “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker.” Bilal later joined The Roots in that set Later in the night, Stevie Wonder, Tori Kelly and Sheila E. also took part in more rounds of Prince tributes.

As if North Texas didn’t already have enough talent, the Observer reported this week that The Joule hotel is trying to help lure even more to the area. The upscale Downtown hotel has reached an agreement to provide free accommodations for artists that agree to come to Dallas for the purposes of recording an album with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, The Walkmen, countless others) at his Oak Cliff studios. In exchange, the artists staying at the hotel will do things like write posts for its blog, include pics of the hotel in their Instagrams and maybe even play acoustic sessions, among other possibilities.

Also reaching new heights is local singer-songwriter Andrew Tinker, who announced last week that he’ll have one of his compositions in Disney‘s upcoming Pete’s Dragon remake. Co-written by his onetime Polyphonic Spree bandmate Toby Halbrooks, who also helped with the film’s screenplay and production, the song “Nobody Knows (How to Say Goodbye)” was recorded by The Lumineers just for the movie. As if that weren’t enough, Dark Rooms frontman and budding film composer Daniel Hart will handle the film’s score.

Speaking of writing: Will Johnson has written his first book, which is being described as a combination of his original fiction and personal memoirs. It’ll earn its release in the coming months via Goliad Media, which also plans on re-issuing Johnson’s 2011 solo EP Little Raider with two additional, previously unreleased bonus tracks.

In a similar vein, New West issued a Slobberbone greatest hits LP back in April. That collection got the video treatment this week, adding a slideshow of a bunch of old photos over the band’s “Gimme Back My Dog.”

Finally, Buffalo Black announced a new EP coming the fourth quarter of this year and Street Arabs announced a breakup, with soon-to-be-former co-frontman Aaron Barker promising a new project called The Eggshells that will make its debut this fall.

Cory Graves is the Associate Editor at Central Track. He enjoys not only writing about Dallas and its local music scene, but being a part of it as a member of the band Vandoliers. Courtney Love once referred to him onstage as “my fucking therapist,” which he immediately put on his resume.